"In Memoriam" (Alice Winn): More than a romance, a novel that really shows wars are just brave, scared kids being pressured to die for their countries

I don't usually read romance novels, but "In Memoriam" really caught my eye. The book is about two 17yo British boys in love with each other who end up fighting for their country in WWI. One thing about this book is that it really emphasises how young the soldiers were (and are) in different wars. The age to volunteer was 19 in the beggining of WWI (lowered to 18 at one point) but it was very easy to go around this age requirement, and kids were often pressured to. An example of this pressure (which I didn't know about) was the white feather movement - a movement to give white feathers to any man who looked of age to fight but wasn't fighting, so as to call them cowards and pressure them to join the war efforts. Other points I found particularly well-written and hard to digest were the "In Memoriam" sections in the middle of the story, where you could see all these 17 and 18 year old boys listed in the casualty list; it really broke me, as someone who is much older. Lastly, I also really liked the depictions of PTSD in the book (shell-shock as they called it). It's devastating to read, I can't even imagine how it is to live through life in the trenches and come back home, and try to live life as nothing happened. Just devastating. In general, I really liked the book, I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but it's a great read. I would say the parts that I didn't love were that some of it was pretty unrealistic (particularly the lack ofof homophobia, every single person was so okay with the guys being gay, which would be great, just not super realistic. The sex scenes were also not super realistic, but I wasn't reading the book for them, so I wasn't super bothered. Oh, and their damn names. Gaunt and Elwood are terrible names for main characters, Gaunt only reminded me of Harry Potter lol. All in all, I really liked the war parts of the book. I thought it was a good description of how awful the war is, how young every kid is, and how many people just died (reading that the battle of Somme took 20k British lives in one day was devastating; I knew it was a big number, but 20k is just unimaginable). The romance part was sweet, but I didnt think it was the best part of the book, it felt a bit childish, though I do admit that it makes sense for the love between two 18yos to be childish.